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Internal Links For SEO

Internal Links For SEO

Once your website is up and running you will be looking for different ways to keep your website visitors on your website for longer and with higher level of engagement. Adding internal links for SEO can definitely help you with this.

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The top benefits of internal links are that they keep your website visitors on your page for longer and major search engine bots love these internal links. GoogleBots in particular love following all the internal links that they can find. It really adds depth to your website and helps make it an authority site sooner. You also have a wonderful chance of gaining a return website visitor or even better still, they might like your content so much that they share it on social media.

So what are internal links?

Internet, source Pixabay, RawPixel

Simply put, there are three main types of links on any website.

1) Internal Links

Internal links are when you ask your website visitor to “please click here” and then you take them to a second page / post on your website.

For example, please click here to see my post on how to get royalty free images for your website. This will take you to a 2nd page within my website.

2) External Links

External links are when you give your website visitor the option of clicking a hyperlink and then leaving your website and going to a second website.

For example click here to see more SEO information on YouTube or a link to go to Wikipedia to learn the definition of an industry key term. For example, to learn what is a Search Engine Results Page? please click here.

If you click on this video you will stay on my website post. BUT if you click on the “Click here” in the sentence above you will go to YouTube and see the video there (external link).

3) Backlinks

Backlinks are links left by website visitors. A simple example of this is when visitors leave a comment on my blog posts, I allow for them to leave a comment and a “back link” to their website. If you would like to leave a back link to your website, please feel free to leave a quick comment in the feedback section below and I will add it to this post.

Are lots of internal links a positive thing?

This is a great question to ask.

Thumbs Up, source: Pixabay, TeroVesalainen

The answer is yes!

At the time of writing most major search engines reward website owners who manage to keep their website visitors on their website for longer and Internal links certainly help in this regard. The general feeling within the website building community is that you can have an almost unlimited number of internal links without any fear of being penalized with your search engine ranking.

The key is to have your internal links pointing to relevant content that supports your main idea that your audience appreciates reading and everyone will be happy! Please don’t just link to random content on your website on the hope of keeping your visitor there for longer than they need to be. No one likes being tricked and your visitor may just abandon on your website in frustration.

Issues to look out for

Affiliate links count as external links and it has been said that too many external links to affiliate website may in fact hurt your website, so you need to balance out the total number of external links that you use.

When you take your website visitors away from your website, you run the risk that they will not like the content on the second website and move away quickly (bounce rate). This may in fact lower your website ranking.

Extra tips for using External links

Another really good tip when using external links is to let your website visitor know where you are taking them when they click on an external link.

For example, sometimes when I use a word that the audience may not know I simply highlight the word and IF the website visitor chooses to click on the link, then they go to an external website.

An example would be right here with the word User Experience (UX). It just appears in the sentence at random and the hyperlinks suggests if they click on it they will go elsewhere. In reality in this case they will go to Wikipedia.

This is an OK way of doing things, but it is not ideal.

One of your goals is to build trust with your website visitors and give them a wonderful User Experience.

You could try this approach instead.

According to Wikipedia “User Experience (UX) refers to a person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service.” (source Wikipedia.com). Now in the User Experience example shown here, if you click on the Wikipedia link, you can reasonably expect that if you click on the hyperlink that relates to Wikipedia.com you will go to Wikipedia.com. It is a very clear and simple way of doing things and we are all much happier this way. Don’t you agree?

If you need help with how to insert internal links and external links and what text to display please see these images.

Log into the back end of your website,

Then click on the Dashboard.

Then open up a New Post.

Then move the mouse to where you would like to insert an internal link.

then click on the “chain” icon found on the editor tool bar. This will open up the Paste URL text box.

Then click on the little “Wheel cog” icon.

This will then open up the “Add Link Dialogue Box”.

Then simply select which one of your pre-written blog posts you would like to link to and then click the blue “Add link” button at the bottom of the screen.

You are now returned to your website post and the text that you originally selected is now underlined showing that it has a hyperlink attached to it.

If you need step by step video instructions on how to do this step, please click here to go to Wealthy Affiliate.

Bonus, extra tip when using External Links.

Whenever I am sending my website visitor to an external link, I always like to tick the “open link in new tab” tick box. The reason is that I am not 100% sure that they have finished with my website and I don’t want them going to this external website and getting distracted and then forgetting to come back to my website. So by opening the second external website in a new tab, my website information remains exactly how they left it.

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Are you using internal links for SEO at the moment? What is working well for you? What is not working well for you? Please feel free to leave any helpful tips or suggestions in the comments section below. Thank you for visiting us today.

12 thoughts on “Internal Links For SEO”

Hi Glenys:
It was very interesting to read regarding the various types of links. For internal links I think a person should have more than 5 posts so that he/she can interlink it. For people who are learning regarding writing in blogs and SEO etc., I recommend this site for them. This is a very useful site for beginners.

Hi Bishal,
Thank you for visiting my site, I really appreciate that. Thank you also for your kind words.
Yes, I agree that learning about the different types of links and how you can apply them as a blogger to maximise your chances of a website visitor staying on your page for longer and also to get higher rankings by search engines.
I think that anyone can do an internal link from their second plog post onwards. I would simply do one post (any topic), then page 2 would be your contact us page. The person would then simply say “to learn more about XYZ topic, please click here to go to our contact us page”. This is a very simple way to get the ball rolling until you can flesh out the website further.

Thank you also for your kind comment that this is a great site for people new to bloging and SEO. That is a very kind thing to say and is definitely my intention.

Because I think that you might already have a website, please feel free to have a look at my top tips to improve your website ranking.

Very informative article on Internal Links For SEO. It was really good to see tips on both internal and external links as well.
I try to use lots of internal links on my posts, provided they are all relevant to the topic.
When I use external links there is always an equal number of internal links for balance. Not sure if this helps SEO but it certainly doesn’t hurt.
Thanks for the helpful post.
Ed

thank you also for your kind words. We try to share quality information that people can use to help grow their business online.

I like your tip to try and use an even number of internal and external links where possible. You brought up a lovely point there – thank you for sharing some of your experience with everyone today. I really appreciate that.

Excellent information about the broad range of SEO links. And thank you, because of you I know more about what to do and not to do with external links. One question tho, how many external links can you put until its too much as my website reviews movies and I want to promote both the movie itself and it’s merchandise.

Thank you also for your kind words, I think that the internet moves so quickly and that together, by sharing our knowledge and understanding everyone learns more and we can all grow.

External links. The question of external links is an interesting one. The reason being is that some external links go to “neutral sources”. Things like Wikipedia or the movie franchise home page or to some trailers that are promoting the movie. You can do lots of these external links if you think it will help your audience – please remember to select the tick box that says “open in a new tab”.

The other sort of external links are links with Affiliate Links attached. As a Blogger these links are the most interesting to us, but are also the sorts of links that Search Engines are looking to minimize.

So the key really is all about balance.

I have a friend who likes to do a review of a particular topic, with only one or two Affiliate links attached, but then add a GIANT button that says something like “to see products about XYZ, please click here”.

This could also be a nice compromise for you.

So you could do a post about a particular movie with lots of your opinions about the movie on it, then at the bottom of the page you would write “To see the top 10 selling items based on the movie, please click here” and then take them to a page dedicated to merchandise only.

The final answer of course is a mix of what your audience is expecting to see and what the Search Engines will tolerate and rank you for so you can get more and more free traffic.

Experiment with different options, ask your customers what they would prefer and “track and measure” as they say.

Good luck with it. Please remember that the answer in 2016 was different to the answer in 2018 and will be different again in 2020. As the internet evolves, so must we.

I would like to add more internal links to my website but it is in the beginning stages and I only have about 10 posts. So far my topics haven’t been as related as I would like and my niche is slightly broad. I am hoping as time goes on to really narrow down my topics so I can build an audience based on that and also create more internal links.

Thanks for stopping by. First things first, well done on getting your first website up and running. You should be very proud of yourself. I know I am proud of you for making it this far.

LOTS of people dream of one day building a website and creating a business that allows them to make money on the internet.

Good on you for turning your goals into a reality.

It is great that you have x10 posts up and running. Now is a great time to start adding internal links.

It does not have to be complicated. It could be as easy as saying “if you would like to know more about XYZ send me an email” and then refer them to your contact us page. That is an internal link in action.

Another thing I would do is, if you have touched on a topic that you feel should be fleshed out in full a bit more, then that should be your next blog post. Then you can go back to blog post #1 and say to learn more about XYZ, please click on this link to read a blog post I wrote.

Thank you for posting this very clear and informative post about internal and external links, why they’re important, and how to use them.

I’ve been attempting to get more diligent about helping my readers find related information about the subjects I write about. After reading your post I am understanding better how to structure my posts so that I don’t have the problem of folks wandering off and jumping ship.

Thanks again for dropping by and sharing some of your knowledge with our readers. I really appreciate that.

You are right, when you first start out learning how to structure a blog post and offer value to your readers it can be tricky to find a balance between refer them to quality external information and also keeping their attention on your website.

I know I had that problem when I first started out. I had a website in the health niche and there were a lot of medical and industry terms and I felt my audience wouldn’t know what they all mean, so I had to learn how to use both internal and external links to get the right balance for my readers.

Yeah, internal links are quite important! I add 2-3 internal links on every post I make. I think it’s also important to return to your older posts and add some new internal links that link to your newer posts. This way you’re constantly updating all of your posts and the search engines really like this kind of behaviour!

Thanks for stopping by and sharing your experience and knowledge with our readers. I really appreciate that because together we all learn more.

I really like your idea to crank up the internal links to around 2 or 3 per post. This will really offer a wide variety of options to your readers. That is a great idea – thank you for sharing.

I really like your tip to return to older posts and freshen them up with links to some newer content that didn’t exist day 1 when the post was written. This is really adding value to your readers and helping to freshen up old posts at the same time. Well done for following through on this one.

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